Posts Tagged ‘eating live octopus’

A couple of young, live octopus experiencing there last moment together (weirdasiannews.com)

A Japanese restaurant in Toronto has recently begun to offer live octopus on its menu. I didn’t know anyone anywhere would eat octopus live, but apparently it is a not-uncommon dish in South Korea, where it is called San nachi or Sannakji.

Those of us who are carnivores eat a lot of cooked seafood, probably some raw – sushi, for instance, and perhaps on occasion some newly shucked and still living oysters, or even perhaps some raw sea urchin gonads.

But live octopus?

Only young, small octopus are eaten alive – you don’t need to imagine some huge monster in a bowl of water in front of you, ready to eat you back. And you don’t need to imagine how you are going to cut it up while it is roaming around the bowl – it is small enough that you can stuff the whole animal into your mouth and chew it up there.

What does this really look like? Here’s a video of someone eating one for the first time, and she clearly needs more practice at it. And then this video of someone somewhat more experienced.

There is at least a very small risk that the suckers of one of the octopus arms will latch onto your palate, and when you try to swallow the rest of it, you will choke to death. But that isn’t why I have such a problem with the whole event.

An octopus isn’t an oyster or a sea urchin. It has eyes very similar to ours, a bigger brain for its size than any other invertebrate, and a habit of changing colors according to its probable emotional state. It is a stealthy, solitary, intelligent predator. When a female lays her eggs, she sits and guards them until they hatch, and then she usually dies. Altogether, an alien life-form to admire and co-exist with. Not to eat.

So, though I love to eat lobsters and fish, I don’t intend to eat any octopus, dead or alive. I also really don’t want to eat any animal that is still alive, even though octopus, or lobster, or fish or other non-human predators obviously eat their own prey still fresh and alive.

Famous blue ringed octopus, small and lethally toxic (marinebio.org)

To make my hypocrisy even more blatant, lobsters usually die an ugly death before when they are cooked, fish have probably suffocated slowly to death after capture, and we know far too much about what most of our chickens, pigs and cattle go through before we eat them, yet still I eat them all with enthusiasm.

Faced with a young octopus in a bowl of seawater in front of you looking at you looking at it, eager to make a run for it, would you wrap it up on your fork and eat it?